


What Might Have Been

by thriftstoreteacup



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Legends character in the Disney timeline
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-11
Updated: 2020-03-11
Packaged: 2021-02-28 23:01:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,053
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23105176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thriftstoreteacup/pseuds/thriftstoreteacup
Summary: This takes place immediately after The Last Jedi.Mara Jade notices something different about today, which prompts her to reflect on how her life has changed since the fall of the Empire.
Kudos: 9





	What Might Have Been

Mara’s first clue that something wasn’t right this morning was the realization that she had slept in. Every night for the past thirty years, Mara had been violently awoken by the last command of the Emperor whom she had served faithfully in her youth, given to her, fittingly she thought, in the form of a recurring nightmare. Every night, she stood in the Emperor’s throne room and watched as Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, standing in front of the throne, turned from one another to her Emperor and together raised their lightsabers high to strike him down. Just before their lightsabers fell, every night, the Emperor screamed to his faithful young servant “YOU WILL KILL LUKE SKYWALKER!” and it was always at that moment that Mara woke up.  
At first, Mara had been determined to carry out her last mission for her beloved Emperor, but the more immediate needs of survival forced her to postpone taking action. Everyone who knew that the Emperor’s Hand was even a real person, not to mention that it was her, had died with the Emperor at the battle over Endor. Mara had been forced by necessity to start over, to build a completely new life with a new identity. Adding insult to injury, Mara found that without the Emperor’s guidance, her ability to draw upon the force had been greatly diminished. Abilities that she had once taken for granted now ranged from difficult to impossible. For years, Mara blamed and hated Luke Skywalker for upending her entire life this way.  
Years passed, Mara gradually built a new life for herself, putting the skills that she had learned in the Emperor’s service, at least the ones that she could remember or relearn, to use working for a vast smuggling and information-brokering network that had sprung up in the power vacuum left over after Jabba’s demise. In her heart, Mara still told herself for a long time after the fall of the Empire that one day, when the time was right, she would finally fulfill her last duty to her Emperor, and kill Luke Skywalker. However, the more she travelled the galaxy, the more she talked to people who had been affected by the Emperor’s brutality, the more Mara came to realize that the idea of the Emperor and what he had stood for that she had in her mind, and had been faithfully loyal to for all these years, had been a lie. One morning, about fifteen years after the battle over Endor that had changed Mara’s life forever, she awoke once again to the sound of the Emperor’s rage, but this time was different. Instead of quietly vowing to herself, with less and less conviction, to fulfill the Emperor’s dying wish, Mara knew in her heart that she wasn’t that girl anymore, blinded by loyalty and comfortable lies about the justice of what she did in the Emperor’s service, and she simply said, to the empty air in her room, “No.”  
The dreams hadn’t stopped then. If anything, they had gotten worse, as if the late Emperor could somehow, even in death, sense Mara’s defiance and was even further enraged by it. By this time, having realized that Skywalker had done the right thing standing up to the Emperor, Mara was determined to do the same, in her own private way. The dreams lost some of their sting, even as the Emperor raged and screamed, and Mara even started to feel a sense of camaraderie with the Luke of her dreams in their nightly struggle against the Emperor’s ghostly last gasp of lingering malice.  
This morning however, Mara realized that for the first time in thirty years, the dream hadn’t come. Unsettled, Mara got up and started her morning routine. She was about halfway through her first cup of caf when she realized what had happened. Mara hadn’t been ordered to kill Luke Skywalker in her dreams last night, because the Emperor didn’t need her to do it anymore. Luke Skywalker was dead. Mara slumped down in her chair in shock, and sat there, stunned, staring at nothing for long moments. Not knowing what else to do, and scolding herself for being sad about the death of a man she had never actually met, Mara pushed her feelings as far to the back of her mind as she could, and got to work. All that day she found any excuse she could to keep herself busy, trying not to think. That night, weary from busyness and fighting her own feelings, Mara fell into her bed, and into an uneasy sleep.  
On this night, for the first time in thirty long years, Mara had a new dream. She found herself standing at the top of a cliff, on a green island surrounded by a roiling sea. From next to her, Mara heard a voice. “I never knew until now what you’ve done for me, what you’ve been doing for so long. I wanted to thank you for it.” Mara turned toward the voice, and saw an old man wearing white robes, with long, unkempt hair. She was puzzled for a moment, until, when she looked into his eyes, she realized that she knew him. Though she had only seen him in dreams, a much younger man, there was no mistaking that this was Luke Skywalker. “It was nothing.” Mara said. “You actually stood up to him face-to-face.” Luke smiled, shaking his head, and replied “I only had to stand up to him once. You’ve done it every night for years. That’s not nothing.” Then, a little sadly, he added “I wish I had had the chance to get to know you. I have a feeling that we could have had something special.” As she looked into his eyes, though she couldn’t put her finger on why, Mara felt the same way. “I know what you mean.” she said. “Perhaps in another life…” Then, Mara awoke, far more gently than she had ever awoken from the Emperor’s dream. She looked at the crono by her bedside, and, seeing that there were still a few hours left until dawn, Mara sank back down onto her pillow. She laid there in the dark, wondering what might have been, until the first grey light of dawn started to peek through her window.


End file.
